Two poems — Rachel Nagelberg

I participate in the illusion I have a
credit card I buy mostly organic I’m
paying back my student loans some
nights I experience gaps in the artifice—
my pupils dilate my belly shakes ( my
nervous system revs its engine ) and
the pretense wavers like a jellyfish
disappearing into dark waters and
what I’m left with is a hollow terror
( like Caleb in Ex Machina when he
attempts to reveal a machine beneath
his skin failing1 ) there is this idea
that if you think about yourself asalready dead then you stop seeing
yourself as a victim of life that is to say
what is hidden beneath the seeming
is not necessarily the secret consider
the way a sentence is false we can
say one thing and be another this
is the failure of materiality this
is the expression of art — telling
the story of its own failures

1 the opposite of Oz

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THE MYTH OF RETURN

The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of
Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream
of returning to dust. —Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

there is a structure we are taught to see more Real than
God just as we contemplate the body as stationary—
our organs as throbbing chunks suspended in muscle
and blood ( bone scaffolding tissue insulation ) what
then is a disease but an intruder? on the contrary a
house can grow black mold just as a Garden grows
humans is the root of alienation then an anatomical
issue? my craniosacral-chiropractor shifts my uterus
aside there is a sense of urgency innate to sickness
similar to poetry I’m having a hard time translating I tell
him my speech is filled with gaps if survival depends
on letting go of nostalgia then what will our organs
hold onto? we are in need of a new language a de-
colonization of origins a new myth of creation ( is
that not what the Internet is? a non-corporeal map
of power an incomprehensible mass identity ) just
embrace the machine and you will be “realized”2 or
perhaps first a hydrogen bomb will shoot our minds
back up to the stars to stay on Earth is to disappear
the soil doesn’t feel like it used to the city expands and
contracts like a spent lung propelling the network forward

2 in the sense of Peggy Blumquist’s ideology in Fargo Season 2

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Rachel Nagelberg is an American novelist, poet, and conceptual artist living in Los Angeles. Her debut novel, The Fifth Wall, is forthcoming fromBlack Sparrow Books in April.